Whitewater won't splash

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, June 2, 1996

LAST WEEK, the media lost-and-found department divulged an evocative film clip of Jack and Jackie Kennedy arriving in Dallas that gorgeous long-ago Friday morning.

The horror that followed cost America a beloved leader, but it could not erase a record of the country's yearnings. Watching those pictures, we can see what democracy at its most confident can produce. For those who backed JFK and the even greater number who rooted for this young president's success, "High Hopes" was not just a Sinatra-sung campaign song; it was a secular prayer of what this country could be.

But Jack Kennedy was, for those who remember him, both more and less than a myth. He was a politician, a committed professional dedicated to both the study and perfection of his craft.

This is precisely what the 46 year-old president was doing in the late morning hours of November 22, 1963. Driving to the airport for his short flight to Dallas, Kennedy quizzed Gov. John Connally and Fort Worth Rep. Jim Wright on what made the people of Dallas so right wing. Why, he wanted his hosts to explain, had Fort Worth, where he just received a rousing early-morning reception, stuck to its Democratic roots while nearby Dallas lunged so hard to the GOP right?

Wright, a tough Democrat who would decades later become speaker of the House, blamed the situation on the arch-conservative Dallas Morning News, which that very morning carried a vicious ad accusing the president of Communist sympathies.

Connally offered a socioeconomic assessment. The roots of the rightward shift of Dallas could be traced, he argued, in the structure of the economy. Unlike Fort Worth, a city of factory floors and blue-collar workers, Dallas had become a high-rise boom town of banks and insurance companies filled with men wearing white shirts.

The folks in Fort Worth still drew their politics from the fellow working alongside them. The guys in Dallas were getting their political guidance from where they were headed personally - to the next floor up, they hoped.

This is how smart politicians and their paid consultants look at politics today: the way Connally was looking at things back then. Want to understand how people are going to vote? Ignore the latest newspaper headlines; look at their underlying economic and social situation. Look at how they make their living, where they see themselves heading, whose interests they find themselves identifying with.

This is how the smart money is looking at the 1996 presidential election: not at the latest headlines from Arkansas but at those persistent economic and social factors that shape election results.

Exhibit A: A recent poll asked American voters what they valued more in a presidential candidate, his ability to identify with their own personal situation or his character. Some 77 percent chose the first.

Exhibit B: A poll published on Friday showed Bill Clinton leading Bob Dole 56 percent to 40 percent. What's impressive about these numbers is their total: 96 percent. That leaves only 4 percent of the American electorate undecided.

Of the 96 percent of Americans who have made up their minds this June, the overwhelming factor remains the state of the economy, which is far better than it was four years ago. Like Jack Kennedy, the president who invented modern politics in this country, the professionals know that this - not Dole's employment status, not Whitewater - will decide the election.

Christopher Matthews is The Examiner's Washington bureau chief. He is the author of "Kennedy & Nixon: The Rivalry that Shaped Postwar America." &lt;